Guardian 28,456 / Brummie

61 comments on “Guardian 28,456 / Brummie”

1. Thank you, Eileen, been patiently waiting for the blog to explain NON-NATURAL. Failed to spot the musical reference, which is unforgivable in a player.

   ORANGE is in Orange County, California.

   Lovely, satisfying crossword, many thanks, both.

2. Lots to like here, although I too needed help with the parsing of NON-NATURAL, for which many thanks, Eileen. Thanks also to Brummie for an entertaining puzzle.

3. Of course there is no such thing as a haley bush though it would have been a better answer.

4. Thanks Eileen. Quicker than Monday’s outing for me, quite unusual for a Brummie. I too thought along the lines o state capitals, but had to abandon that as no more appeared – I might be being a bit slow, but what connects the theme words?

   Also thanks to Brummie

5. I waited to get CYGNETS before deciding on NON rather than NOT NATURAL
   There are two PALM SPRINGS.
   Certainly not Route 66 or Hy 61 but a fun trip.
   Thanks

6. Liked GESTAPO, if that doesn’t sound too bizarre, and CYGNETS. Last one in, surprisingly perhaps, was MOBILE. Maybe because I’m one of the few people in the world who doesn’t possess one. SAVANNAH reminded me of those Geography lessons at school where regions of the world had be coloured in…

7. 3d’s ‘suspended in mid-air’ got me fixated on Boris and the zipwire, and couldn’t get MOBILE. Liked CREOSOTE, CYGNETS and NON-NATURAL. Didn’t spot the mini-theme. Thanks to Brummie and Eileen.

8. A fail as I bunged in Haley… more of a pioneer maybe, but not a bush! Otherwise cruisy from the Brum. And re bands, 20ac always reminds me of “I was down in Savannah eatin’ cream and bananas” by someone (Lovin’ Spoonful, maybe..?). Stared at 3d for an age, staring at the very object, d’oh. Nice glow from 21d, my very first was an Austin A40, a hand-me-down from an uncle and aunt, prone to blowing head gaskets but a lovely comfy old bus. Lots to enjoy, ta Eileen and Brummie.

9. Great crossword, great theme (no, I didn’t spot it); thanks Brummie.

   And thanks Eileen for adding to my musical knowledge with NON-NATURAL

10. NB grantinfreo @8: I tried Berry at first

11. Similar thoughts, pnin @3.

12. Indeed, yesyes @10, Chuck was my first thought but the crossers killed him off.

13. Goodness me, that was remarkably straightforward for Brummie, but no less enjoyable for it. Smooth as a smooth thing.

    Ta Brummie & Eileen

14. Thanks for the blog.

    Nice puzzle, looked for but didn’t spot any theme, natch.

    Brummie seems to have improved enormously.

    Time for setters to put ENT (hospital dept) out to a well deserved retirement, somewhere with lush grass, shelter, companions and children to feed it apples.

15. I think I remember that “Handy” is the German term for mobile phone, which adds an extra definition to 3d. I look forward to Beobachterin confirming that!

16. My friends in Berlin refer to their mobile phone as a “handy”, so I wonder if that was intentional by Brummie?

17. Had to look up 3d on my phone. Oh, the irony.

    Thanks s&b.

18. Liked THUMBS UP, SPUD.
    Did not parse 13d, 19d (park in Dublin = Phoenix?)
    Didn’t spot the mini-theme.
    Thanks, B+E

19. Yes Eileen. Here in Leicestershire it was known as “tick”. You will also be aware of the very localised word “mardy”, documented by Iona and Peter Opie ….!?

20. Thanks Eileen and Brummie

    After discovering that there is a city called Orange in Orange County I’ve been trying to fit 16d as a guide to the theme. Could it be TEN A(merican) CITY. It just about works as 10 answers give 8 US cities!

21. I meant, I wonder if the German slang was in his mind when he used that element of the definition or whether it’s just because it fits in the hand – which is probably the reason it became die umgangssprachein the first place.

22. ‘Mardy’ is one of my favourite words, Jinja @19.

    Ingenious, Feliks @20 – but I don’t think HOLLYWOOD, for one, is a city! 😉

23. I was also slightly wrong-footed by PHOENIX as Scroobius Pip insists it ought to be spelt PHEONIX “despite what the Oxford English Dictionary says…” in his song ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ and he’s a proper published poet! ??

24. 10FC@16. You just reminded me that when PalmPilots and other “wildly popular handheld computers” were the hottest thing since digital watches some company or other (I think it was Korean) planned to introduce a competitor that they intended to call “hand job,” until someone pointed out that the name was somewhat less than ambiguous. (I tried googling to confirm the name, but forgot to switch my browser to private mode.)

25. Possible Nina along the bottom without the N and two letters above anagram of DYSLEXIA. I’ve got my coat 🙂

26. Was much more on the setter’s wavelength today and even where I used crossers and description to get some answers I could parse nearly all of them.

    Lots that I liked and made me smile too: WOOD, CYGNETS, SPRINGS, VEGANS, THUMBS UP

    Thanks Brummie and Eileen

27. Being a Brummie I went looking for a theme and whilst there are several US cities I’m with Dave@4 I’m wondering what the connection is. And like ronald@6 and others MOBILE was my loi. FLY-TIPPING was my favourite clue.
    [Eileen – we had MARD in Lancashire as well – along with NESH).
    Thanks to Brummie and Eileen – although for once I didn’t need help with any parsing!

28. Yes, WhiteKing, ‘nesh’, too. (I’ve just looked and it’s in Chambers (‘susceptible to cold’ – that’s me).

29. Eileen @22 – In defence of my tenuous* theory there is a city called Hollywood in Florida!

30. For the first time with Brummie I got off to a flying start, with half the answers on the first pass (it was as smooth as something smooth that’s been smoothed, AlanC @13!). The second half a little bumpier, once the friendly crossers had all been used up. Was left with three sticky ones: PALM, PADS and MOBILE, the last of which took me nearly as long as the rest of the crossword. Partly this is because the surface seemed to suggest wordplay that wasn’t there (‘mid-air’=I, ‘it’s suspended’=TI?), but also there are so many possible words that would fit. Got there in the end, though.

    There was a theme?

    Thanks Brummie and Eileen (thanks for the Buddy Holly link – always a pleasure).

31. ‘Tick’ was also the usual name when I was a child in Warwickshire hundreds of years ago. Conscious that major European cities usually have a US imitator I googled Venice USA and, sure enough, it is a suburb of LA.

32. One of these days I will remember that China = friend. Surely this must be a contender for 15sq’s “most hated cryptic device “?

    Apart from NON-NATURAL being a mediocre bit of vocab, I had a blast with this one, though. VEGANS, CYGNETS and INCIDENT were my favourites, and I had a reasonable bash at understanding the theme, which is most unusual for me. 🙂

    Thanks Brummie and Eileen.

33. Cor, that was easy for a Brummie (not that I am one, y’understand…) Fair flew in with very little holding me up.

    Thanks Brummie for making me feel for a small portion of my day that I am cleverer than the experts are at pains to tell me I’m not…

    And Eileen for the blog!

34. Before I spotted the other cities (yes, I do think TEN A CITY is probably deliberate) I saw HOLLY, ORANGE, PALM and possibly CREOSOTE (it’s a bush) and wondered if the theme was something to do with not seeing the WOOD for the trees? I also thought HOLLY might be BERRY at first, and wasted time on NOT NATURAL – it’s a long time since I did music O level!

    [grantinfreo@8: my first vehicle was also an Austin A40, already 12 years old when I bought it from a neighbour, on which I learned to check the gaps on spark plugs, change oil and tyres and other things that I now gratefully leave to the garage. Took me safely over several hair-raising Welsh mountain passes and gave me a lasting fondness for hatchbacks – I believe it was the first one.]

    [And thanks for reminding me of the wonderful Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.]

35. Thanks Eileen for the musical meaning that stumped so many of us and well done for spotting the theme. I made an early error with BERRY too, until I ran out of Toms and thought again, and as with Boffo@32 was deceived by China for a long time despite seeing it recently – I liked the surface of that one despite or because of it being so wordy for a short solution. Also misled by the excellent (as a clue!) GESTAPO but my favourite, for provoking a hazy memory of a crossword several years ago which was the first time I met it, ESCUTCHEON, thanks Brummie.

36. GrannyJ@15, 10FC@16: “Handy” is also almost always used now for “mobile phone” in German-speaking Switzerland, not sure about the other parts:[ I recall that “Natel” was a common term when I first came here, Wikipedia says from the name of the state telecom network for cars (introduced mid 1970s!), and claims this was common to all language regions.]

37. Never heard of FLY-TIPPING. Guess we call it something else.

    Is “NON-NATURAL” actually a word? I’ve never heard it, in musical contexts or elsewhere.

    Who’da thunk that GESTAPO was an anagram of postage?

    As well as several cities named Orange (20) in the US, there are nine different Orange Counties. (Thanks, google.) Some, such as the famous one in California and presumably the one in Florida, are predictably named for the fruit that state grows. But the one in New York, where my grandfather lived and where I spent part of my childhood, is named for the House of Orange of Holland. The Hudson Valley, including Orange County, was a Dutch colony before it was British, and New York City began as Nieuw Amsterdam. There are still plenty of Dutch names in the city and the region, including Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. Even Hartford CT, where I Iive, a hundred miles from the Hudson Valley, has Dutch Point, where all the streets have Dutch names from its first colonizers.

    PHOENIX Park made me wonder how many city parks I could name outside the US. Got one or two in London, Paris, Vancouver and of course Dublin.

    Andy@14 I love that picture!

    Got all of this last night, if you count NON-NATURAL, which was the only thing I could think of but refused to acknowledge as a word until the blog this morning. Also had PODS for PADS.

    Thanks, Brummie for the fun and Eileen for the added illumination.

38. Hi Valentine @37

    NON-NATURAL is in Chambers: ‘not natural; forced or strained’. If you google ‘Non-natural, music’, you’ll find lots of references.

39. Can’t give this puzzle a THUMBS UP (one of the better clues) – it was as though we were doing a dance at different tempos (perhaps a foxtrot and a waltz) and rarely got in step. When we did so PALM and MOBILE (LOI) caused a rare appreciative chuckle. Overall was pleased when it ended, and that it didn’t go to a protracted penalty shoot-out with half the whole world watching ……

40. A decent ear worm today….

41. Didn’t work….https://youtu.be/3B8bvVJ7-uk

42. Straightforward solve today for the second time (The Times was a simple top-to-bottom exercise for me today as well). What to do with the rest of the hour? (A question already asked once, when I finished The Times crossword). I suspect there’s a pair of stinkers on the way tomorrow!

43. Most of the time when you don’t look for a theme you never find it; nevertheless I enjoyed this with INAPT, PROPERLY, THUMBS UP, and SPRINGS (hardly ever tick a DD as a favourite) as especially satisfying. Thanks to both.

44. Vega(n)s?

45. pnin @44. (A)las, no.

46. I did a Google Maps search for GANGLAND on the off chance there was a so-named US location that everyone had missed, and found quite a number of hits – all establishments in India!

47. I’m sure the cities must all feature in a song somewhere. Does MOBILE work without a knowledge of German? I can remember being bemused when first asked “Haben Sie ein Handy?”

48. Valentine @37, Eileen @38: “Is “NON-NATURAL” actually a word? I’ve never heard it, in musical contexts or elsewhere.”

    I’ve never heard of it in musical terminology. The symbols are usually referred to as ‘accidentals’ and in a musical spelling context the presence of a sharp/flat is more in relation to the key and has little to do with whether the note is a ‘natural’ or not. For example, if F-major, B-flat is the natural note because diatonically it is correct way of spelling the key. However, B in the context of an F-major tonality would be a non-natural note but would acutally be preceeded by a natural sign – confused yet?!

    In that case, a B would be referred to in the context of F major as a ‘non-diatonic’ note.

49. Finished this remarkably quickly for me this morning, (even managing to parse them all), with the exception of 3 down. Came back to it this evening and suddenly remembered an episode of QI, where Stephen Fry was urged to do his impersonation of a camp German looking for his mobile phone: “Wo ist mein Handy?” I took German A-level back in the 60s, but of course mobile phones hadn’t been invented back then.

    Thanks, as always, to setter and blogger.

50. Leicestershire born and bred, so I played tick, but nobody was ever ‘it’, they were ‘on’. Unless of course they were a mardy-bum.

51. MaidenBartok @ 48 – sorry for the delay: I’ve been eating!

    I’m sorry I can’t add anything to my comment @38. I haven’t 1/10 of your musical knowledge and can’t respond to your second paragraph but the various pages I found via Google re non-natural notes made sense to me.

    Hi Markfieldpete @50 – I’ve wondered for a long time whether you really were a Pete from Markfield but didn’t like to ask. I agree with the whole of your comment. 😉

52. Eileen @51: Not a complaint at-all (and thank you as always for the blog…). It just seem to be a very strange clue indeed!

    I’ve just consulted the Oracle of all-things musical, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and nada!

    I’ve finished eating and now back to drinking although more eating, and drinking, may happen later. It does seem to happen like that since 23/3/2020…

53. MaidenBartok @52 – ‘a very strange clue indeed’, indeed!’

    And I totally concur with your final paragraph. 😉

54. Neither Holly nor Haley occurred to me but I thought my answer of Berry wasn’t that bad if it weren’t for those damn crossers.

55. MaidenBartok & Eileen. Isn’t the clue ‘flat possibly’? That is, for example, not an A natural but an A flat. The fact that NON-NATURAL is not an accepted technical term in music does not matter, as this is a cryptic allusion, not a definition. (Eileen – your suggestion @38 of a Google search didn’t do any more, in my experience, than bring up references to the *natural* as opposed to the flat or sharp, and as MB says, to accidentals, rather than an acceptance that a flat can legitimately be termed a non-natural. Which would seem to confirm this as a made up, or even whimsical, definition.)

    To be fair, the second half of the clue is also less definition than allusion, as ‘made of plastic?’ refers to the difference between clothes, for example, made of natural fibres and those which are not (and which are normally referred to as artificial fibres). Though I guess the second half of the clue has a better claim to being fairly close to a dictionary definition than the first!

56. Hi sheffield hatter @55

    “Isn’t the clue ‘flat possibly’? That is, for example, not an A natural but an A flat. The fact that NON-NATURAL is not an accepted technical term in music does not matter, as this is a cryptic allusion, not a definition.”
    I thought I’d said all I could on this one but yes, that’s exactly as I read it and as, I think, I indicated in the blog. Many thanks!

57. Eileen – I’m glad we’re reading from the same sheet of music! But in fairness to MaidenBartok you referred in the blog to a double definition without making it explicit that the ‘musical reference’ in the first part was not necessarily accurate in a technical sense (as indeed are many clues of this type, so this is not in any way a criticism). Like you, I can’t lay claim to even a tenth of MB’s musical knowledge, but I think the clue is an excellent one.

58. [Eileen @56 and SH @57: I can assure you any musical knowledge I may or may not have has been suitably diluted by the contents of a bottle with the word ‘Merlot’ on it – I appear to have drunk the mer-lot. So no more sour grapes from me over the clue… just fermented! L’chaim!]

59. [MaidenBartok – that’s the best way to settle a dispute of this sort, but I think you might have kept a glass or two for us, rather than drinking the ‘lot’!]

60. MaidenBartok and sheffield hatter @57 – you’ve both commented while I’ve been typing.

    Hands up: I admit that, this morning, without looking anything up, in my eagerness to post the blog as soon as possible, off the top of my head, I interpreted a ‘flat’ as not a ‘natural’ note (therefore NON-NATURAL?) and, similarly, plastic as not produced from natural materials.

    Thanks to you both. I’m about ready for bed now – I’ve had my Mer-lot, too. 😉

61. We assumed George Bush had a daughter called Haley, until we came here to check…..

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